Hi Andy,
The <tbody>, <thead> and <tfoot> elements were designed to be used when printing a long tables via a printer (not a screen). Their purpose was to repeat the header cells on the top of each page so that continuation sheets are easier to understand. Most spread-sheet programmes such as MS Excel have this function built in under their print options.
If you have a long table in HTML you *can* use CSS to fix the horizontal position of the <thead> and <tfoot> blocks so that the main data part of the table rolls up and down within a frame. I have done this as an exercise with students – but I have never seen it done in the real world. However this is a method for visual presentation and so of no use to a screen reader which already has the function to repeat the relevant <th> cells whenever requested.
In practice, 99% of the times that I come across <tbody> etc. it is just cluttering up the HTML code to no purpose whatsoever.
Regards
Richard
www.userite.com
From: Andy Keyworth
Sent: Monday, January 21, 2013 7:09 PM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: TBODY
Hi,
Thought I’d jump in on this one- I tested some simple HTML tables (both with and without the <TBODY> element) using JAWS 10.0 and NVDA 2012.2.1. None of these seemed to recognize, or change behavior due to, <TBODY>.
I’m hard-pressed to think of an example or situation where changing screen reader behaviour for <TBODY> would really be mandated; it’s an under-utilized element; many tables have header cells right inside what we’d consider the table body, anyway; and well-structured, accessible tables are possible anyway.
>Hi Gian,
>On 9 Jan 2013, at 08:06, Gian Wild wrote:
>Does anyone know how screen readers handle TBODY?
>any understanding or requests how they should handle it?
>Olaf
(Apologies for the accidental duplicate message sent earlier.)
Cheers,
Andy Keyworth
Senior Web Accessibility Specialist | T-Base Communications Inc.
19 Main Street │ Ottawa, ON │ K1S 1A9
telephone. 613. 236. 0866 Ext. 256 │ fax. 613. 236. 0484
email. akeyworth@tbase.com